“How is it to be reconciled with the divine character that the fate of unborn millions should depend on an act over which they had not the slightest control, and in which they had no agency? This difficulty presses the opponents of the doctrine (of imputation) more heavily than its advocates. God must produce such results either on the ground of _justice_ or of _sovereignty_. The defenders of imputation take the ground of _justice_—their opponents that of _sovereignty_. “Is it more congenial with the unsophisticated moral feelings of men that God, out of his _mere sovereignty_, should determine that because one man sinned all men should sin, that because one man forfeited his favor all men should incur his curse, or because one man sinned all should be born with a contaminated moral nature, than that, in virtue of a _most benevolent constitution_ by which one was made _the representative_ of the race, the punishment of the one should come upon all?” That is to say, they affirm interrogatively that imputing sins to innocent beings that they never committed, as the ground of penal inflictions, is a better defense of God from the charge of being the author of sin and of cruel injustice than the Catholic mode of _sovereignty and mystery_. At the same time they discard the _constitutional transmission_ mode of Andover and New Haven. The following from President Edwards the younger, gives the argument of a _constitutional transmission_ divine against the imputation mode. The Transmission Mode against the Imputation Mode. “The common doctrine has been, that Adam’s posterity, unless saved by Christ, are damned on account of Adam’s sin, and that this is just, because his sin is imputed or transferred to them. By _imputation his sin becomes their sin_. “When the justice of such a transfer is demanded, it is said that _the constitution which God has established_ makes the transfer just. “To this it may be replied, that the same way it may be proved just to damn a man _without any sin at all_, either personal or imputed. We need only to resolve it into _a sovereign constitution_ of God.” The Andover and New Haven theologians regard both the Catholic and the Princeton modes as utterly unsatisfactory, and offer instead the mode of _constitutional transmission_ as relieving the difficulties. But Dr. Woods thus argues the case against them, and appeals powerfully to “intelligent and candid men:” Dr. Woods in behalf of the Catholic Mode against the Constitutional Transmission Mode.